10 months later - Review of my AppSumo Deal Sales - It is worth it?
Hey Indiehackers,
I am currently running my second lifetime deal on AppSumo. I'm in 10 months now and it´s time to look back and see if it all was worth it for me and whether or not AppSumo might work for your own tool deal.
My first deal was a total mess with no sales at all, but then I knew eCommerce tools are not a niche that works well on AppSumo. So I developed another tool. But this time, I started with the AppSumo community as my target audience in mind. If you do this, you need to respect these criteria:
- Best go sell a marketing-related tool as most of their audience is freelancers or agencies looking for a cheap boost in productivity.
- Wrap your head around the coupon and redeem functionality. This one was tricky for me and I needed a developer to solve this for me. I wonder why AppSumo does not offer any solution for this from their side when every deal depends on this???
- Make sure your tool does not need heavy maintenance or license fees, so it will be profitable even with only a handful of sales.
- Prepare to promote it yourself or live with the slow sales that drip in over time.
That said, my second deal is an SEO tool. You can check out the deal here:
https://appsumo.com/products/marketplace-vispr-seo-network/
SEO is tricky as people are 50/50 love/hate by default, so you get a lot of really annoying and aggressive questions from people that are either against everything you do or say or just don´t understand SEO at all - while others love you as much. This deal works for me, as the tool itself is a no-code Micro-SaaS, which means it cost me about 500 USD in total and is a one-man show side-gig that needs nearly no time and is free to maintain, so I don´t have any costs or overhead at all.
Sales started really slow and I had a ton of refunds first but I knew this would happen because of the nature of the deal and the way SEO works long-term. But the Black Friday special event got some eyeballs and I was able to ramp in 100 sales (and 40 refunds) to date. (About 8 months now).
I heard the average refund rate on AppSumo is about 15% so 40 seems really high, but again, I knew upfront this would happen because of the nature of this SEO deal and also because I had to decline a lot of users myself because they submitted SPAM data.
As the deal is only 59 USD OT overall sales are only 4000 USD, but I was able to upsell a handful of people with a premium offer and make another 1.000 USD. The deal is now over 10 months and has 10+ 5 Taco reviews. Currently, sales speed up tremendously and I sell an average of 20 new deals per month. Mostly, because of the good reviews, so make sure you get your reviews as fast as possible. Getting any reviews at all was super hard for me, but then again, this was also to be expected because of the special nature of this SEO deal. You will most probably not have this problem with your tool.
Overall it´s a win for me, as I did ZERO marketing and get an average extra income on the side of about 500 to 800 USD every month. Onboarding a new user only takes about 10 minutes, so my hourly rate is pretty good.
But I need to stress that this is a side-gig and I have zero maintenance or development costs when onboarding new users. Also, I don´t need to pay my rent with this! If you do, then it´s most probably not going to work out.
Especially, not for a marketplace deal, that gets no support or love by sharing from AppSumo at all! Basically, they take on every new deal they can get and want YOU to do the marketing for them! That is the reason why they have about 800+ new deals every year. That is clearly too much to sell to any individual Sumoling, so chances are your deal drowns in the masses and never sees any solid sales.
I am afraid this will be true for most AppSumo marketplace deals. Sure, sometimes you see deals that supposedly made 200K, but this is NOT the rule, it´s clearly an exception with only 1 in 1.000 tools able to get to 6 figures in revenue!
Alternatives you should check out:
-
https://pitchground.com/ (They cherry-pick deals and help promote each one!)
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Run your own Lifetime deal
I am now planning to offer a lifetime deal for two new PREMIUM directories in the Startup and Digital Lifetime niches on my own website and promote them directly with the permission of admins on LTD Facebook groups. I will offer the admins a 20% affiliate deal to make it more attractive as these guys all want to earn from it!
As this is not a subscription and I have manual user onboarding, I will be using https://sendowl.com as my payment processor, because it´s only 15 USD per month and offers automatic EU-VAT-enabled invoicing as well as an affiliate system for this price. There is nothing else that is able to match this price point and you can ditch it once your One-Time deal is over.
I have used FB groups promotions before and they are usually a great boost to your offers, so I am looking forward to crushing it. I hope to make 10x the AppSumo revenue in sales. I consider this deal to be a success for me if I can onboard about 50 new users per directory in the next 6 months!
Thanks for sharing, interesting take to focus on AppSumo audience this way.
Yes, I recommend creating a special offer tailor-made for that audience. You need to take into perspective that it´s super hard to near impossible to upsell these people into a subscription later on! Think about it like this: You can create a free basic video course on Udemy and get thousands of students in 48h, but you cannot upsell anyone of those into paying for the premium masterclass later on. It`s just not the right user base or target group at all! As Neil Patel used to send 1 Mio clicks to a website only to have a 98% bounce rate - why even bother? Just find the 20K people that stuck around! That might even be much easier and less effort.
Thanks for posting this -- especially about "...basically, they take on every new deal they can get and want YOU to do the marketing for them". I didn't really realize that was the case before I submitted my AppSumo deal. I was thinking it might be a good marketing channel, but I have made 0 sales from it. :/ I'm trying to figure out if https://appsumo.com/products/devmarksio is just be a bad fit for their typical users or if I need to tweak my marketing copy (or maybe both!). Anyway, I really appreciate your honest review of AppSumo!
Hey Adam, looks like your solution is aimed towards developers and seems very special. I wouldn´t know what to do with this as a marketer. So maybe I don´t get it then you would need to update your description or it´s just too specialized to the mostly marketing audience of AppSumo. I had the same problem with my first deal as it was an eCommerce tool. Awesome for the use-case, but not the right audience on AppSumo.
Just curious, have you thought about another model?
Example: At 2013, myself and my cofounder used a "viral" (was all the rage back then) technique to promote a voice app. It blew up but there was a time it got to 500 users in a week. We were shocked. Obviously it was trial and error for 6 months before it "magically" took off.
Sure, I use this all the time and it works super great! Viralswipe or Upviral will do the trick. But I find it works much better for B2C products and in this case the SEO approach is towards cherry-picked partners, so that makes no sense. But usually, of course, a super good idea!